Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator turned whistle-blower, claimed in 2002 to have uncovered an extensive nuclear black market with links to officials in governments across the globe, including the U.S. and U.K. Despite recent exposure this year in the U.K.’s Sunday Times,(1) her allegations have reached few other mainstream outlets. Despite being published in … Read more
Korean war biological warfare? Issue 11 of the Bulletin of Cold War International History Project contained what appears to be evidence that the allegations by North Korea and the Chinese that the US were using biological warfare during the Korean War were false – were in fact disinformation. Documents apparently from former Soviet archives seem … Read more
There is one book not reviewed here that should have been. The reason is it wasn’t written and, indeed, it cannot now be. I am referring to Evelyn Lincoln’s autobiography. JFK’s executive secretary passed away on 4 May 1995 in Washington and with her have gone all of the secrets she shared with JFK. She … Read more
Gone but not forgotten: a further update on Di Terry Hanstock This update follows on from my earlier articles in Lobster 38 and Lobster 39 Never was the old adage ‘She’s dead but she won’t lie down’ more apt than when applied to the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Although she died almost nine years … Read more
AMBUSH: the war between the SAS and the IRA James Adams, Robin Morgan and Anthony Bambridge (Pan, London 1988, 200 pp £3.99) Following the Gibralter shootings, the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team lead the campaign to discredit eyewitness accounts of how the SAS killed the IRA unit.(1) Ambush is their account of the shootings and SAS … Read more
Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines … Read more
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave London: Verso, 2003, h/b, £17 The story in brief: before and during WW2 Japan stripped the countries it occupied of its transportable wealth — gold and other precious metals, diamonds, cash, bonds and so on. As the war turned against them this was buried in various locations, many of … Read more
Nigel West London: Greenhill Books, 2006, £25, h/b The books of ‘West’ that I have read all have the same problem: he tells you that some of the material comes from past or present intelligence officers and hints that in those sections you are getting ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for … Read more
US deception operation blowback The e-newsletter stuff (1) ran this fascinating piece around 15 March. ‘At the Princeton conference last Saturday, Raymond Garthoff, a distinguished historian now with the Brookings Institute and a former CIA analyst, mentioned that we had recently learned of an FBI-Army double agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to … Read more
In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more
